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'The Divide' Review

By Jason Lees, MoreHorror.com

The Divide (Xavier Gens, 2011)

To start off with, I need to say that whoever cut the trailer for Xavier Gens’s THE DIVIDE should get some kind of award. That damned trailer had me counting the minutes for this flick to hit the shelves. I can’t remember the last time that a trailer affected me like that.

Normally I see a trailer for a movie that I already know a little bit about, but in this case, I’d never even heard of THE DIVIDE and clicked on the trailer when it popped up online just because I’m a long time Michael Biehn fan. That damned trailer just filled me with dread and promised me a film that would disturb, upset, and destroy me.

Jump ahead a few months and I find myself eagerly hitting ‘play’ on the DVD. Yup, the first few minutes are disturbing, and I get to see Biehn do what he does best, disappear into a role and never come out. Unfortunately, after those first few minutes, I kind of wanted to disappear, too.

We open as our cast of characters survive a missile attack on their city by hiding in the makeshift bomb shelter that the superintendent has set up for himself. The super (Michael Biehn) reluctantly takes in a few tenants as they force their way inside. ‘Reluctantly’ may not be the right word. He tries to lock them out to die but a few force their way inside before he can bolt the door and duct tape it shut.

Gotta love modern day duct tape. It’s the ‘hide under your desk’ of the new millennium.

The super and the tenants (played by a truly exceptional ensemble cast including the painfully underused Lauren German) then settle down for the end of days. And here’s the problem. The situation now takes a backseat to the forced powder keg that we’re supposed to be sitting with.

The plot, from why were they bombed and to what are they going to do, becomes merely set dressing as each character is painted in extremely stereotypical strokes to extract every last bit of drama the director can out of them. We get the asshole in the biker jacket, the red neck racist, the femmy foreigner, the doting mother, the whiny kid, the take-no-shit African American (the also incredibly underused Courtney B. Vance).

It’s the end of the world as we know, and I feel like I’ve been here before.

As for truth in advertising goes, THE DIVIDE is intense. It is extreme, and it is hard to forget, but it’s also forced and without direction. It’s beautifully shot and evokes some serious claustrophobia, but there’s not a surprise to be had in the entire film. Maybe it’s my fault for expecting too much, but I really had high hopes for this one.

THE DIVIDE falls into the same blurry category as THE ROAD. These flicks aren’t really horror, and they’re played too straight to be sci-fi, but the situation is too allegorical to be called a drama.

We get scares and gross outs, allusions to cannibalism, and all the morality of a good cross section of dramas, but there hasn’t been a way to categorize them yet. And calling them apocalyptical soap operas just makes me want to gag a little bit and throw up my last can of baked beans.

As a triple feature, maybe try watching THE DIVIDE with THE ROAD and CARRIERS. Somewhere in the middle of all these, there’s the definitive End of the World movie. Maybe that’s the flick I should be waiting for.